Managing the Individual: The Modern Moral Subject in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette

“These struggles with the natural character, the strong native bent of the heart, may seem futile and fruitless, but in the end they do good…they enable [life] to be better regulated, more equable, quieter on the surface; and it is on the surface only the common gaze will fall. As to what lies below, leave that with God.”

(Villette, 1853)

In her work How Novels Think: The Limits of Individualism from 1719-1900, contemporary literary theorist Nancy Armstrong examines the relationship, in the 18th and the 19th centuries, between societal changes and writers’ portrayals of characters in novels. Specifically, she recognizes the importance of the modern individual, who emerged from the novel’s production of a self-governing subject and who embodied the value of moral duty so important to the Victorian Age. The modern subject-one who is able to manage personal desire with submission to the social authority-is also essential to Charlotte Brontë’s novel Villette, as seen by the portrayal of her protagonist, Lucy Snowe. This presentation will analyze the emergence of the self-governing subject by focusing on Lucy’s struggles with her own “natural character,” ultimately arguing that through the governing of her individuality, Lucy Snowe indeed emerges as an example of Armstrong’s “modern moral subject.”